Grace Holds the “Clicket” to the Heavenly “Wiket”‘: Piers Plowman the Roman de la Rose , the Roman de la Rose , and the Poetics of Penetration

This essay is part of the forum on ‘Langland and the French Tradition’, edited by R. D. Perry and Elizaveta Strakhov. Watson argues that L engages with French texts such as the Roman de la Rose and Machaut’s Remède de Fortune in a deep and critical way, weaving French literary influence into the language and theology of his poem. In particular, this essay considers L’s use of the rhyme pair wiket-cliket in passus 5, tracing the rhyme to a French source text, and examining how the sexual valence of these terms may have shaped the salvific theology of L’s dream vision.